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In the late '60s, Vanilla Fudge was best listened to while smoking pot. How else could a band named after an ice cream flavor seem so downright meaningful? Even now, after all these years and without the benefit of a bong, the band's records hold up....

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In 1995 a Manchester band called Sub Sub lost everything in a studio fire. The group had a club-friendly hit in "Ain't No Love (Ain't No Use)" and had teamed up with Tricky and New Order frontman Bernard Sumner to create the trippy tunes so popular o...

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Remember those A Very Special Christmas compilations from the late '80s/ early '90s? They were star-studded affairs, with some good (U2, Smashing Pumpkins) and some awful (Wilson Phillips, Extreme) acts contributing to the holiday spirit. The Maybe ...

on December 10, 2003

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On a cool Indian-summer night out on the rolling plains of Missouri about thirty miles west of the Mississippi, four women sat in a circle of wooden chairs playing fiddles, banjo and guitar around a crackling fire of pine twigs and dead oak that perf...

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The St. Louis Bosnian community is clustered in south city but stretches all over the metro area. Culturally, it reaches even farther, absorbing transplants from its much bigger geographic neighbor, Russia, and the other former Soviet satellites.
One...

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It's not easy getting into Jay-Z's recording home at Bassline Studios, tucked away on West 26th Street in Manhattan. I have to sneak in behind a woman walking into the building, take an elevator to the eighth floor, then knock on a pair of glass door...

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It probably won't pump up my indie cred to admit that I'm going to miss 104.1, "The Mall," the "Hits of the '80s, '90s and Beyond" station that switched over to all Christmas music in November. Sure, part of that may be due to the fact that almost al...

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The texture, timbre and tone of Janas Hoyt's voice belongs to every time and to no time at all. As a former co-conspirator of the Vulgar Boatmen (one of alt-country's great also-rans) and current frontwoman for the Mary Janes, Hoyt is among our most ...

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When k.d. lang released her first major label album, Angel With a Lariat, she was practically a performance artist, offering ironic commentary on the Nashville countrypolitan styles of the late '50s. Would anybody who last heard her in 1987 recognize...

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Experimental rock bands walk on the edge of a knife. The razor-thin line that leads to transcendent music is easy to fall off of, resulting in either mere noise or self-indulgent wankery. Cheer-Accident (named after a line of Hallmark cards) has fall...

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Missy Elliott is damned lucky that she can spot a beat and that she hooked up with Timbaland early on, because she sure as hell can't write more than a few clever lyrics in any given song, and most of them have to do with her ass. Sure, those choice ...

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In the August 1972 issue of Ms., Lester Bangs wrote that "Clearly we need an all-woman rock & roll band that can create the kind of loud, savage, mesmerizing music that challenges men on their own ground." Four years later the Runaways were born, and...

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There are certainly worse ways to end a long and fruitful career at a major record label than compiling 31 hard-to-find B-sides, outtakes and other rarities. But it's hard to imagine Pearl Jam, whose decade-plus relationship with Epic Records ends wi...

on December 3, 2003

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"Most of the music I hear is not hard-core enough. If you're going to play, then play!"
Hamiet Bluiett has been back in southern Illinois for a year now, but when he talks, you can still hear New York City. The 63-year-old native of Lovejoy, often ca...

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In the beginning, there was Brian Eno. And he created Music for Airports, an incredibly soft, incredibly slow album that had more silence than music and more atmosphere than song structure. It gave 1978's nascent yuppies something to listen to as the...

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You don't see too much Champagne at a rodeo. There aren't a lot of slippery nipples served at a bar mitzvah. And if you're sipping Michelob Ultra, you aren't at the right rock show. I don't know if Magee's, hidden behind BJC on Clayton Avenue, serves...

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To answer the inevitable first question, "Scream Toward the Uprising of Nonconformity" is what S.T.U.N. stands for. While that may sound dangerously close to a handbill stuck to any given telephone pole on Delmar, forgive the members of S.T.U.N. for ...

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You'll hear it at least once this Thanksgiving: Some relative will lean over you and, with a gravy-smeared smirk, ask, "Gettin' sleepy? It's the turkey, you know. Some chemical called tryptophan."
It's a lie. An urban myth. The tryptophan in turkey...